Presentations We've Given

Believe it or not, Drupal makes theming easy!

Drupal provides the themer with a system of overrides that allows you to change literally anything on your site. Themers decide what gets printed to the screen and what doesn't - essentially what lives and dies. For this and some other reasons, themers have ultimate control.

Learn how to wireframe effectively for Drupal sites by using the Greybox Model.

Greyboxing is a great in-between solution in the wireframe-to-design workflow. This method also allows the actual design process to be more in touch with the initial wireframe.

There's been a huge push in this community to "Design for the 80%". The idea is that you want to make Drupal really easy for 80 percent of the people who use it. This usually involves setting sensible defaults in form values, and putting things where most people would expect to find them. It means focusing on the usability problems that will affect 80% of the people who use Drupal, and ignoring (or at least setting as a lower priority) the crazy edge cases.

Three years after our first round of formal usability testing on Drupal 6, the UX team returned to the University of Minnesota to put Drupal 7 through another round of tests to benchmark our progress and to identify new areas for improvement. Be the first in the Drupal community to learn of the preliminary results of this new round of testing and join us for a brief panel presentation of our findings. (Co-Presented with Angie Byron, Bojhan Sommers, Brad Bowman, Chad Fennell, Dharmesh Mistry, David Rothstein.)

Drupal is a powerful tool that can provide functionality for your site that was beyond reach just a few years ago. Going from downloading Drupal from Drupal.org to having the site of your dreams can be a daunting process, however, unless you are familiar with some key concepts and development strategies.

Drupal puts ultimate control in the hands of the themer. Use the power to the fullest by finding out the key differences in the newest and greatest version of Drupal and how that relates to building or converting your theme. This session is intended for people who want to make their brand new Drupal site look beautiful. We will cover the important changes new in Drupal 7 and introduce best practices for converting your favorite Drupal 6 themes.

Your theme's template.php file is an indispensable part of creating custom themes and manipulating Drupal's output to exactly how you need it. If you're starting out as a themer it can be a challenge to figure out where to start and how to edit your template.php file to fit your exact needs.

This session will take a look at how you can use different preprocess functions in your template.php. Some commons questions we'll look at his how you can add a caption to a CCK field image, or how you can add custom variables or classes to your theme's .tpl files.

We'll go over some live examples in this session, with some hands on examples of how using these techniques can help you step your game up as a Drupal Themer.

A comprehensive tutorial on the right way to manage your Drupal website. You’ll get a high-level overview of how to modify the way your site looks by sub-theming, preventing hours of frustration should your original theme be updated. We also cover the basics of creating your own module the Drupal way - copying code from api.drupal.org.

There are a number of contributed modules that take advantage of jQuery plugins and HTML5 that can take your site from stale-and-flat to interactive-and-fun.

In this session I'll highlight a few of my favorites: jCarousel, jPlayer, Views Slideshow, Views Accordion, Views Fluid Grid, Image Annotate, and Vertical Tabs , which call all enhance your site without the need for custom code.

I'll walk through some live examples of how to implement and administer these modules, so hopefully you can take your site from good to great.

Audience participation is greatly encouraged, to discuss any modules I might have missed, or talk about some ideas for new modules to leverage any jQuery plugins out there.